Native Advertising: The Facts

Have you heard of native advertising? If not you should take notice now. This advertising strategy is on the rise and showing signs of superseding traditional methods. You may not be aware but it plays an active role in the digital media industry. It is not surprising it is getting a lot of attention at the moment because it is a very powerful tool; a tool that businesses are taking advantage of.

In simple terms native advertising is online advertising that has been blended to match the natural appeal of its source. The classic example is Facebook advertising. If you take a closer look you will spot sponsored (paid) advertisements. You may ask why it is important that the advert doesn’t stand out. This is the clever part; an advert that blends in looking like an innocent post within the newsfeed has potentially a higher click rate.

Facebook is just one classic example there are in fact three types of native advertising to be investigated.

Social

Businesses can enjoy seeing their posts appear on the newsfeeds of people that would potentially be interested in their product/service for a fee. In other words the post will appear based on a set criteria set by the business.

Related content

If you were to click on the Huffington post website you will be welcomed by a wide range of articles for you to explore in accordance to your taste and preferences. But take a look further down the page of your chosen article and you will be introduced to a “related articles” section. As the name suggests these articles will link to another website. This is of course native advertising at its most powerful.

Of course when you read an article and get to the end you will often want to know more which is why the related article section at the bottom is a very clever way to hook you in. An advertising technique that the magazine industry have been doing for a number of years now. A link from a well established website suggests that the related content is news worthy but of course it comes with a price tag.

As we all know the internet is profoundly known for its advertising as it’s everywhere. It can be annoying and frustrating for many. Therefore it becomes necessary to put a disguise on and blend it with content of interest. Our natural reaction nowadays is to ignore advertisements but a blended ad takes far more effort to ignore and usually too late as the consumer has already been directed to an offer or sale.

Paid Content

As the title suggests this form of native advertising is the most expensive but works really well. You may have noticed there are some blog sites that have tons of content but many of these posts are actually paid for.

To conclude native ads have the potential to perform far better than banner advertisements and as they are not placed into places sporadically the “click rate” could be much higher.